1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to computer networking and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for discovering and cloning a configuration of a computer in a data center in an automated manner.
2. Description of the Related Art
A system administrator may desire to provision numerous computers (e.g., servers) in a data center (e.g., a production environment, a server farm and/or the like) with identical or near identical configurations of various computer resources (e.g., software applications, hardware devices, operating system, network components, clustering software and the like). For example, the data center may comprise numerous clones of a particular computer with a gold standard configuration of the various computer resources. Such a gold standard configuration may be based upon the current best practices for data centers.
As an example, such a datacenter may be used by an organization as a disaster recovery site. The numerous clones are provisioned in accordance with the gold standard in order to recover from a loss in productivity due to a disaster (e.g., a flood, a power outage, an inoperative computer and/or the like). The term Disaster Recovery (DR) refers to various actions performed to provide computing resources to a client computer in the event of failure in the data center. The failure can occur due to multiple factors, such as a component failure (such as hardware or software failure), natural disaster, or any other technical disasters (such as virus attacks).
Conventional techniques for provisioning computers (servers) are manual. Hence, such conventional techniques are expensive and do not scale well. Because the servers are manually configured, there is a strong likelihood that errors occurred during the provisioning. Such errors may cause unpredictable problems associated with the software applications running on the servers. Further, such conventional techniques are restricted to provisioning the computers with a limited number of well defined services (e.g., File Transfer Protocol (FTP) file services, Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) Domain Name Service (DNS) services, and APACHE web services) and/or to a specific software application, such as an operating system (e.g., LINUX).
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for cloning a configuration of a computer in the data center by using a configuration snapshot to provision one or more hardware computers in an automated manner.